Special Issues

Lee on Literature: Illness as Metaphor

Susan Sontag's essay exposes preconceptions about medical conditions

October 28, 2011, 4:00 am

By Lee Miller

While sick with breast cancer in the 1970s, author and
feminist Susan Sontag wrote the essay “Illness as Metaphor,” which was first
published in 1977. Sontag argues that cancer is the most powerful disease
metaphor, and also the most unfair.

“Cancer” is
often discussed in terms of military language: a “fight,” a “war,” an
“invasion,” an “attack,” a “radical treatment”—some of the same language used
by the Nazis to describe the need for extermination of Jews. Unlike modern
heart disease, for example, cancer is mysterious in source and cure, and more likely
associated with the faulty character of the afflicted rather than simple
genetics. The metaphor that Sontag describes enters the relationship between
the individual and modern society, and forms the foundation of cultural phenomena
like the AMC television series Breaking
Bad.

To illustrate her ideas, Sontag compares tuberculosis (the
scourge of the 19th century) to modern-day cancer. TB was often
described in the 1800s as producing spells of euphoria, increased appetite and
sexual desire—a periodic flush of life. Modern-day cancer is an opposite state.
TB was considered the result of superior character, “the artists’ disease,”
resulting from a sensitive and creative nature, separate from an industrialized
world. The rock star of 19th century Europe, Frederic Chopin, was “tubercular
at a time when good health was not chic,” when it was “glamorous to look sickly.”
This chic, a fusion attempt with the highest social class, still appears today
on high fashion runways and the countenance of Johnny Depp. Many celebrated
writers had TB, including Kafka, Keats, Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson and DH
Lawrence. Their writing romanticized TB, as they were often “forced” out of “unhealthy”
urban areas to mountains, the Mediterranean, or South Pacific islands as a
prescription for recovery.

In contrast, cancer is often perceived as the result of
character flaws. In Tolstoy’s Death of
Ivan Ilych, the main character slowly dies from cancer, and then clearly
sees his self-deceptions, failures of character and the foibles of the surrounding
society. The cancer metaphor helped raise the stock of Freud and Jung. A belief
that repressions created cancer, that mental health caused cells to mutate, led
to extensive study and clout within this field of psychology. The modern
“existentialist,” defined by Sartre and Camus, is also derived from a cancer
“victim”: passive, unfeeling, robotic, uncaring, inhuman, an antihero. The myth
that mental will causes cancer (and can cure it) is still prevalent today. Guilt
persists with the cancer victim, an embedded idea that they did something wrong
or disharmonious, that they somehow deserve this malady. In tandem, a cancer
patient on the doorstep of death is still fed huge doses of optimism, all lies
about his or her actual condition.

According to Sontag, the power of the cancer metaphor is the
reason for all of these deceptions and misunderstandings. The mysterious causes
and unknown cures feed fear and paranoia, an irrational phobia. This mindset
seeps into the relationship between individuals and society and distorts
perception; it seeps into the language used to decipher modern culture, to
grapple with our darkest fears.

Vince Gilligan, the creator of the AMC hit television series
Breaking Bad, taps directly into the
power of the metaphor Sontag describes.The Breaking Bad series’ main
character, meek high school chemistry teacher Walt White, is diagnosed with
lung cancer and transforms completely. Walt starts cooking methamphetamine to
make money for his family before he dies, but instead runs headfirst into the
myths of modern society with its corresponding lore surrounding cancer and the
drug world. The fourth season of Breaking
Bad finished in October 2011. The fifth season (16 episodes) will be the
last, yet maybe the viewer can now watch with a different eye, keeping Sontag’s
classic essay in mind.

Lee
Miller is the author of the Bengali novel, Kali Sunset (www.clovercreekpress.com), the
story of how cancer changes Mrs. Sona Choudhury’s perception of her family, her
life, and 20th Century India.